Australian Govt Forces Apple, Adobe, Microsoft To Explain Price Hikes 371
An anonymous reader writes "Live outside the U.S.? Tired of paying huge local price markups on technology products from vendors such as Apple, Microsoft and Adobe? Well, rest easy, the Australian Government is on the case. After months of stonewalling from the vendors, today the Australian Parliament issued subpoenas compelling the three vendors to appear in public and take questions regarding their price hikes on technology products sold in Australia. Finally, we may have some answers for why Adobe, for example, charges up to $1,400 more for the full version of Creative Suite 6 when sold outside the U.S."
Re:Valve / Steam... (Score:5, Insightful)
I already know the answer. It's the same reason Canadians pay far more for the same items in the US even though our dollar has been at parity for years now.
There was one scandal where Bombardier, a Canadian company receiving government money, was charging Canadians more for ATVs made in Canada than they charged in the US. So effectively the Canadian government was subsidizing a company to rip-off it's own citizens.
Translate this to legalese: (Score:5, Insightful)
"Why? Because fuck you. That's why."
bad idea ? (Score:2, Insightful)
difference in pricing models like this encourages piracy.
When we move to all digital, we're screwed (Score:5, Insightful)
The next gen of consoles are going to screw us on digital sales, infact anyone selling movies / games / music digitally in general, I hate to go all tinfoil on you guys but they've proven time and time again, they simply do not care about foreigners.
If you can charge bob 3$ for the icecream and mary 8$, then do it â" especially if you're the only place selling icecream now. Only bob is America and we're mary.
To take it to 11 on the tinfoil mode, when things become all digital "they" will have control, full control. EA have already proven just how evil digital control is, go find a GOTY edition of Mass Effect 1 2 or 3. They don't exist. You think you're getting a bargain when you buy Mass Effect 2, a 50$ US PC game for 5$ on a Steam sale? Awesome! (Well you are, it's still good) but the DLC is on THEIR controlled internal store and it's ONLY on their store and do you think the DLC is marked down to 10 or 15% of the original cost like the full game? Ok what about 20%? or 30%? No. Not only is it extremely rarely marked down, when it is, it's a small amount (I think it's been on sale twice, in nearly 3 years)
The console manufacturers are sadly GOING to region lock us when it's all digital and they WILL charge us more than Americans. Interestingly we probably wouldn't even notice or care if it was 20 years ago and we didn't have American buddies posting on the same forums or links to deals or reddit threads or whatever saying "holy crap, I just got a sweet God of War 4 deal on the PSN store for only 9.99" â" except we'll click the link "not available in your region" or "on special, this week only, 49$ AUD"
Australians need to be prepared that this whole digital thing IS going to shoot us square in the wallet, then the face. I'd wager good money on this.
Long story short, region free PS3 took me from being a dodgy pirate to someone really happy to purchase games, I'm happy to pay 20 to 50$ US a game, no qualms - hell the Americans do it, don't you? Except they frequently try to stiff us from 95 to 120$ US a shot,....... it's unreasonable, it's bullshit and unacceptable.
Even worse is on digital stores online, they detect my IP and the price for a digital product of 1's and 0's is 30 to 100% more. It's _incredibly_ frustrating as almost any foreigner could tell you.
Long story short? You think this is bad now? Just wait, soon there won't BE steam "gifting" from your American pals, there won't be a US PSN store to log in to with PSN credits you purchased on Amazon, there won't be stores which will ship you foreign region free games. There won't be a G2play where I can buy a cheap key of Diablo or Starcraft cheaper than the Blizzard online store or retail. Why would Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft provide these 3'rd party 'stores' keys to sell?
Australians, in my opinion we're actually in the peak part of bargains right here, in 2011/2012/2013 and maybe 2014 - we've got fairly cheap international shipping, we're in the mid retail -> digital conversion so everyone is clamouring for our buck. Soon the loopholes will be closed, the infrastructure, policies, design all in place for a single store for companies and bam. Kiss the awesome times we've had goodbye. :/
Finally, most stores won't do deals like Valve, they seem to be one of the few with respect for the customer, we're in for a bad time
Price Fixing? (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, because you can ask the soviet union (USSR) how well price fixing works and how it doesn't ever lead to shortages and black markets.
Come to think of it, you can ask the USA right now how well their price fixing of money is working. Yes let's print $90,000,000,000.00 per month to loan money to ourselves because nobody else in the world thinks we're a responsible borrower who will pay back our debt.
And honestly it's like Obama says: "Raise the debt ceiling because we have to let the world know that we can definitely pay our debt, if they lend us the money to do it"
Re:Build Your own software (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem is that the manufacturer's use globalization to pick and choose the cheapest components, and the cheapest labour form anywhere they can, and then turn around and deny their customer's the same thing by region locking things, writing contracts prohibiting their dealers from selling to people out of country, and all sorts of other BS that they themselves don't have to deal with.
If "Free Trade" applied to customers as equally as corporations I don't think anyone would have an issue with a company pricing things however they wanted, wherever they wanted. It's the fact that I often am not allowed to pick the cheapest location that bothers me.
Re:Valve / Steam... (Score:4, Insightful)
[Steam] producers determine the price for Austrailia if they sell there at all.
Then these producers should "appear in public and take questions regarding their price hikes".
Re:Translate this to legalese: (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll take that into account the first time i see 'colour' in a manual.
Re:Ratings cost money (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't just have to pay to get the classification. They have to pay lawyers to do the paperwork, accountants to handle the financials, service and support to handle refunds and disputes, and so on (not to mention the managerial overheads). It wouldn't surprise me if these costs exceeded $1 million.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that the prices are always justified, and I'm sure that there is a big "because we can" factor as well. As an Australian, I too have been outraged on more than one occasion by the price that we have to pay for goods in comparison with the US. However, my day job (which admittedly involves hardware, not software) has given me an appreciation for the amount of actual effort required before you can start selling something in another country, and the company needs to recoup that cost somehow.
Re:Valve / Steam... (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet if I was to go overseas and buy as many copies of Photoshop as I can fit in my bag, jet back to Oz and resell them it is illegal [slashdot.org].
That is why I don't buy panasonic kit (Score:5, Insightful)
Ten years ago my parents bought me a video camera, they were on holiday in the USA. A few months later it broke. Panasonic UK refused to service it (even if I paid) claiming that it was not one of their products. Basically they were protecting their extra margin because these things were sold at a higher price in the UK than in the USA. This is short termed thinking - I will avoid buying from them ever again.
Companies like globalisation - they make goods where it is cheapest and sell the same stuff at different prices everywhere. But if we, the consumer, try to do the same they stop it. There is an inbalance of power, large corporates abuse it. We like to think that we live in a free market, we do not.
Re:Valve / Steam... (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to be under the misguided belief that costs determine prices. In the real world, that's only rarely true,
Microsoft, Adobe, etc are not charities like the Raspberry Pi foundation; they adjust their prices in order to maximize their profits.
In an ideal scenario, competition would lower the prices. There are many reasons why this doesn't happen in this market, but you can thank government-granted monopolies like patents for a big chunk of that - it's kinda hard to compete when you can't even implement FAT on your OS without paying Microsoft.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Because they can (Score:2, Insightful)
...As long as artificial monopolies like 'regions' are tolerated it will only continue....
Actually - In Australia, 'regions' are illegal, and all DVD players are now required by law to play all regions. There was a big supreme court case over this.
Not surprised at all that our government is taking the next step. Things like modchips are also legal, since they they effectively circumvent an anti-feature found to be illegal.
Australia has pretty good law - we ought to, seeing as how we have more government than you'd think we need per capita... Oh well, at least they're putting the extra polish on.
Case in point: Rights can't be signed away in Australian law: A term in a contract or agreement which infringes on a Right would generally be stricken and voided, but the remaining agreement/contract would still hold. This holds retrospectively even if you didn't know you had such a right when you signed.
Contrast this to American law: If you've agreed to it, too bad! Even if it infringes upon your own rights. Especially if you didn't even know you had such a right.
EULA's also have yet to be tested: But by Australian contract law they arn't valid either - they amount to adding terms to a contract (the implicit contract of sale) After the Fact - also not allowed. And since you are under coercion to click "I Agree" otherwise your computer will not work, such a thing is actually quite invalid. (no agreement is valid if made under conditions of coercion - in this case, you'd have to find a way to do things without that piece of software, and this may well prove impossible. Think the "i agree" that you click for DirectX after buying and installing a game. (never mind the clingwrap agreement on the box - these are invalid too - valid contracts must be made to an indentified party, and can't be offered to "anyone".)
Technically, to be valid, you have to be given the contract to read before paying: Apple actually does this correctly on their iTunes / iphone apps store. But for practically all other software purchases, especially retails ones as in the article, this is basically untested.
Essentially, EULA's and the sale of "software licenses" has distorted the economy, by circumventing very basic and general (and old!) consumer protection laws, such as "fitness for a particular purpose" and the right of resale etc. Basically, you don't "own" the configuration of your own hardware. This is tantamount to owning an idea. (but let's keep other kinds of "intellectual property" out of this).
Essentially, "software as a business" is a scam: The world's largest and most long running successful conjob. It's acquired the coverted mantle of legitimacy. Way to go BillyG! And so our global economy is kinda broken this way. But it's nice that a lot of the sheer angst it's caused has ended up creating something awesome: Behold Linux! (and OSS in general): If there weren't so many people frustrated at MSFT's mismanagement of their PC's, not nearly so much genuine international community cooperation would have converged to create these awe-inspiring public works!
Basically, we already know what the world's creative endeavours would look like when intellectual property law ceases to exist.
And it is Good.
Re:Valve / Steam... (Score:5, Insightful)
I sure wouldn't want other countries which buy our imports to say to us "wait that's not fair; it only costs you guys $40/tonne to export iron ore and we're paying $150/tonne. We're going to get the government involved to try and fight that somehow".
To that I would say "the value of something is whatever its buyer is willing to pay for it" and we have to be consistent in that.
Re:Valve / Steam... (Score:4, Insightful)
They are profiteering.
No shit. No one was claiming otherwise. However, last time I checked the Australian government was pretty conservative and the country is pretty wealthy with an extremely low poverty rate. That makes it a goldmine.
Laissez-faire has its costs. [wikipedia.org] This is what happens when you charge whatever the market can bear, a market that can handle a heavy load, such as Australia, will get charged a premium. In countries like China, where these companies have to compete with free pirated software and cheap bootleg hardware, prices are bound to be substantially lower (not to mention the fact that China is lacking in economic freedom, so their government would have a much easier time intervening if foreign companies were attempting to gouge their upper class).
Don't blame these companies for playing by the established rules. Here in America we get fucked by these same companies in a different way: for the most part, they don't pay taxes. But I blame the system that allows them to do it, not the companies themselves. If you think this is "bullshit" then you should take active measures to oppose laissez-faire capitalism -- don't cry like a little girl about it. Don't stonewall your mind to any logical arguments that may oppose your claim of "bullshit," at least make a cogent argument as to why it's bullshit.
Re:Valve / Steam... (Score:4, Insightful)
_that_ is the problem.
Australia can make this a lot easier by changing the rules:
0) it's totally legal for people to import and re-sell stuff they buy legitimately elsewhere in the world
1) anyone bringing software in from the USA can easily pay sales tax on it before reselling (no other import duties though)
2) the manufacturing company isn't allowed to disadvantage the user merely for using software / product in Australia
#2 is hardest to balance. In the case of Microsoft,
-refusing to activate windows would not be acceptable.
-Saying that you have to get customer support on the standard usa numbers in usa times would be acceptable.